


“Wake Up,” He says.

by Killmongerrrr



Series: Ouroboros: What Was Left in the House [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Angst, Blood and Gore, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Child Abuse, Doppelganger, Dreamwalking, Flashbacks, Horror, Inspired by Anatomy (horror game), Inspired by House of Leaves, Inspired by The Haunting of Hill House, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2020-12-31 05:40:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Killmongerrrr/pseuds/Killmongerrrr
Summary: He asks himself what it is to be a being like The House, large and unable to wander, but breathing all the same.What does it think? What does it dream?orThat House was never right.____Edit: I rewrote some of the chapters cause I wanted to make this more series oriented





	1. Luther: Belief

**Author's Note:**

> Will be posting chapters for each sibling, hopefully daily but if not then every other day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The House was easy to ignore as a child when he had something to prove to his siblings, but once they were gone he was left to stew in the silence of a living body.

Luther has never believed his siblings; about the **H****ouse**, about Dad, anything really. He thinks that’s why they stopped talking to him eventually; why they left him all alone in that **Ho****use**. Five had been the first to leave, and when Ben died, the rest followed in Five’s footsteps. Diego left when they turned 17, then Allison for stardom, and Vanya for college. Klaus had never really left per say, but there’d been a point when Dad had simply become fed up with his drug habit and kicked him out.

The **House** was easy to ignore as a child when he had something to prove to his siblings, but once they were gone he was left to stew in the silence of a living body. Mom talked to him sometimes, but her perfect stillness and frozen smiles put him on edge as time went on. He’d find himself going through repetitive motions as to ignore the **House’s** voice, which crept into his head ever so often and whispered doubts about his existence.

He’d ride in circles on his bike and reorganize his room until his arms grew tired, never allowing himself to go down the rabbit hole of how things seemed to reorder themselves every time he’d blink; how windows would close by themselves or disappear completely, or how hallways would open up where they never were before. And when his body was so hideously altered, he’d find himself letting the **House’s** voice in ever so often, even as Dad carefully warned him not to. He’d have dreams of peeled skin and stripped muscle, and wake up with bloodied fingernails and clawed streaks along his arms.

(He remembers leaving the bathroom a mess of bloody tissues and ace bandages, ripped skin meticulously wrapped and hidden at the bottom of the trashcan to hide his shame. He stops trying to hide the carnage when Dad sends him to the moon.)

Dad tells him not to trust anyone and dies on March 24th. Fabric stings the scabs riddling his skin and he comes back into the **House’s** embrace like an old friend.

He’s never believed his siblings about the **House**. Not then, and not now.

________

Allison tells him about the **House**, once. It’s on a night where neither of them can sleep and a storm is raining chunks of hail against the windows. Klaus has been screaming all night, and this is before his room is soundproofed so his shrieks echo throughout the halls like demons in an old manor.

“I think it’s alive.” She’d said, her voice quiet as the shrieks had abruptly shifted into frantic sobbing before dying out completely.

“What is?” He’d asked, but he’d known already what she was talking about, had seen the **House’s** walls blink and its kitchen faucet rain out clotted bits of blood on waiting hands.

“The **House**. It feels wrong.” She stopped. “I think Klaus was right.”

“You’re just paranoid. Dad said there’s nothing wrong with the **house**, remember?” He smiled and took her hand. “Don’t let Klaus get into your head. You know he just likes attention.”

She’d sighed and pulled away from him.

“I shouldn’t have expected you to understand.” And like that she’d left him all alone in his room. He’d felt bad for a split second, but he knew it was necessary. His siblings were delusional. Maybe he was too but he knew not to trust himself, he knew not to trust what he saw.

Dad has always told him to look twice.

Blink.

“I think it’s alive.” Allison says. Hail rains against his window.

Klaus doesn’t stop screaming this time.

_______

The moon is agonizingly lonely.

He’d always dreamed of coming up here, but it’s been two years since arriving and the ache of isolation has since settled underneath his skin. No amount of peeling or cutting has done anything to quell the build up. Instead it fizzles and sits, and his misery festers like a wound left exposed to open air.

He hears footsteps behind him sometimes, despite the fact that he’s completely alone. Some nights he’ll feel something drape its arm around him as he lay in bed, and he’ll pretend to sleep and hope to god whatever is breathing against the back of his neck doesn’t decide to rip his throat out. Other days he’ll feel a presence trailing directly behind him, like something familiar. The one time he turns around nothing is there, but fear is gripping his heart all the same.

The night he almost dies in his sleep is the same night that the thing appears once more, its cold breath brushing against his skin and sending goosebumps down his spine. It’s the same night that his dead brother greets him in his head.

He finds Ben in an empty marsh, standing amongst tall grasses that disappear under murky waters. He is holding a lantern of sorts, and the sky is alit with a plethora of stars but no moon.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Ben says.

“Ben? I don’t understand.” Luther says stumbling through the water towards him.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t understand.” He says. “You’re too far.” And like that he lets go of the lantern, and for a while they both stand and watch as it floats up and disappears into the sky.

“It’s time for you to go now.” Ben says, and then he’s sinking and sinking until he’s completely vanished under the water’s surface.

Luther wakes up and the thing is gone.

He tells himself it was just a dream.

______

(“As number one, you have to make sure the others don’t become consumed by their fears.” Dad tells him.

And Luther, young and naive and so willing to let him in his head if it means just an ounce of approval, nods. The scratching in his walls become mere tales plotted in his head by childish siblings. Klaus tries to get him to understand, once— but he simply shrugs off Four’s frightened ramblings and tells him to stop lying.)

______

Five said the world was gonna end.

And it does, brought on by a rapture of fire  
and ash.

“The day we die,” Klaus whispers, and clenches the dog tags around his neck.

  
Five takes them back, and Luther has never believed his siblings about the **House**.

______

_It breathes, so putrid one could smell._

_“Wake up,” Your dead brother says,_

_But he does not wish you well._

_You dream, and into your head it peers._

_“Are you the only one up here?”_


	2. Diego: Breathe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And he’d hear the whispering of the House in his ear, hungry and lustful for flesh as its teeth and nails raked down his skin.

There’d always been something inherently _wrong_ with the **House**. All of them had seen it, but it’d become an unspoken rule to just not talk about it. Some of them liked to act like there wasn’t anything wrong at all—liked to bury their heads in denial till there was no air left to breathe. Luther was a sure example. Dad had successfully drilled himself into his brother’s head till every word his siblings ever spoke about the **House** was a lie through clenched teeth.

Others, like Klaus and Ben, had been the most sensitive to the **House’s** advances. For years Klaus had gone on about imaginary rats and scribbled schizophrenic phrases on the walls of his room. He’d have moments where it seemed like he was possessed, or simply wasn’t lucid enough to comprehend anything beyond what the **House** told him. He’d repeat phrases that no one but him ever uttered, but sounded chewed up and regurgitated all the same. 

Ben was different— different in that he was quieter about the leech we called a **House**. He was nihilistic, often times fatalistic, and seemed to know more than he let on about the everything. Him and Klaus had both settled on the idea of a flawed existence, particularly one in which Ben died too young to ever get a glimpse of anything beyond the **House**.

He was _trapped_.

So when Ben finally did kick the bucket it was no surprise to anyone when Klaus went off the deep end. He’d gone off on a tangent about starving and doors and pathways, and his head never seemed as put together after that. 

Diego himself had never liked talking so openly about the **House** like they did. He wasn’t in denial like Luther, but it irked him to say anything out loud. Five had asked him once if he noticed anything off about it, if he believed Klaus and Ben. He didn’t deny it outright, simply said that the **House** wasn’t right. But then Five disappeared and there was no one left to not-talk-about-it with. He became trapped inside a **House** reeking of paranoia and fear and _anatomy_.

But he wasn’t wrong, and no one thought he was. Because they all had the same thought; the same thought that grew for some and simply remained small and insignificant for others.

That **House **was never right in any sense of the word.

So when Reginald died it had come as no surprise to him. Being in a place like that— that whispered and berated you, it was inevitable.

Denial really only got you so far.

______

Diego always had a rule about the **House** when he was a kid. He never allowed himself to wander it at night, at least alone. Klaus had told him in a moment of clarity that that’s how it gets you— it starts with a simple walk down the stairs until those stairs are twisting at odd angles and hanging upside down and opening up doors you’ve never seen before. That was how Ben had discovered the _stomach_, Klaus told him, but something like terror had graced his features and he’d cut himself off.

Diego never finds out exactly what the _stomach_ is, but it scares him all the same.

So for years, he lives in fear of stumbling upon a hallway that has never existed, or accidentally walking through a door and finding it flooded with stomach acid. The stomach haunts his thoughts and dreams in the form of water tanks and sizzling skin.

Some nights he’ll wake up with his hair and clothes soaking wet as if he’d gone swimming, and for a moment he’ll forget how to breathe.

And he won’t.

His breath will lodge itself in his chest but his lungs never ache and his skin doesn’t sizzle like it does in his dreams.

He’ll breathe out, and for a second he’ll feel relief.

“_Nice_ _try_ _Number_ _Two_.” The **House** says.

And his room will fill up with water all over again.

_______

Eudora dies and his life comes crashing down like a wave over a forlorn ship. He finds her, shot dead and bloody and no sign of a pulse. He thinks that this is what it feels like, to be hopeless yet so angry all the same. His head is clustered with bloodlust and rage and tragedy yet all he can do in this moment is hold on to a body that won’t stir or rise.

Her murderers are gone and so is his brother.

“_Not_ _good_ _enough_, _Number_ _Two_.” The **House**rasps.

He wishes this was another sick dream.

________

The water tank is a memory and a nightmare all the same.

It’d been part of his special training with Dad once he’d discovered during a particularly traumatic mission that he could hold his breath for an indefinite amount of time. Naturally, Dad had wanted to capitalize on that ability, explore it if you will.

It’d started with swimming laps in a pool, and graduated to a clear tank in a sectioned off basement. He’d been made to chain down his ankles so as to not float or swim to the top, and to add to the ongoing list of stressors; the tank was sealed shut with a clear lid that prevented any hope of escaping.

Sometimes Reginald would stand and take notes in that notebook of his, other times he’d leave and wouldn’t come back for hours. The cold would be so unbearable that his skin would go numb and he’d find himself panicking and gulping in mouthfuls of water as the chill started to bite at his bones. When Reginald was gone long enough, he’d swear that the tank would get deeper and deeper, and hands would grab at his legs and arms and pull him down into an abyss that reeked of digestion.

And he’d hear the whispering of the **House** in his ear, hungry and lustful for flesh as its teeth and nails raked down his skin.

And then he’d wake up in the infirmary, apparently having passed out from “self-inflicted injuries” that both him and Dad know is anything but. But Mom is so comforting with her easy smiles that he’d convince himself everything is ok. The **House**becomes a distant thing that lives in his lungs and he will drink up as much affection as he can during the small hours that he is allowed to rest under his mother’s supervision.

And when his siblings ask what happened he will simply pause and say, “This **House** has ever been right.”

And they will know exactly what he means.

________

He doesn’t hate his brother. He knows that Luther has suffered the same abuse he has, that his only way to cope was denial.

But still, the bitterness that has since amounted from when they were children ferments like an ugly sore. Reginald’s pitiful funeral ends with a fight and a broken statue.

Klaus looks sick.

________

Five comes back and the future isn’t worth shit.

He didn’t believe in it anyway.

________

The one time he disobeys his rule, he’s 15 and he’s just discovered the magic of sneaking out.

He doesn’t realize something is wrong until he passes by Vanya’s room a fifth time. Maybe awareness is what triggers it, because now that he looks around the House is distorting and warping into a parody of its familiar self (and isn’t that something? That a **house** has a sense of self and existence).

He tries running back to his room, deep regret pooling into his stomach as the **House** starts to fill up with water— but the hallways look so malformed that he stumbles and trips. The water is slowly rising but its enough to snatch his breath away and trigger another onset of panic and-

“Diego?”

He opens his eyes.

The water is gone.

Where is he?

“Mom?” He says, blinking. He’s laying in the hallway and morning light is just barely starting peek through the windows.Mom is staring at him, and she looks so concerned that he almost feels guilt, but something in him stops and wonders if he’d done anything at all.

“Are you ok sweetie? Would you like some breakfast?” She asks, reaching a hand out.

And he knows he shouldn’t reach for it but he does anyway, and all at once her expression falls into something grim and fake, her skin paling and rotting like a corpse in the woods. This isn’t mom; he knew it wasn’t her but something in him still reached out and yearned for a warmth he knew the **House** wouldn’t give him. The **House** is an unkind thing, born amongst human memory. It does not want him like he wishes it does.

“Diego?”

He opens his eyes.

The water is gone.

Where is he?

Repeat.

________

He kills mom before the **House** can leak itself into her brain. He can already see it making its way in when the light goes out of her eyes.

_____  
  


The world ends, but Five takes them back.

Klaus tells him that this is wrong, that they weren’t meant to survive, and he can only agree. Today was the funeral, and Diego keeps to monocle this time.

“Do you hear it?” Klaus asks him later from the backseat of his car, his voice heavy.

“Hear what?” Diego asks, but he already knows.

“The **House**. It’s so alive.” A quick pause. “It’s calling my name. Number four please come back.”

And Diego stops because he hasn’t said it out loud since he was a kid when hands dragged him down into the impossible abyss of a water tank.

“That **House** has never been right.”

_Drip_

His clothes are wet.

_ Drip _

He wonders if this is a dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you didn’t catch it, the water tank was Diego’s version of the stomach.


	3. Allison: Reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Growing up with powers like hers inside a house like that, Allison had come to the early conclusion that reality is temporary. It is ever-changing, like the distortion of a staircase or the switching of a room.

Even when she’s far away from it in LA, Allison can always still somewhat  hear the  **House** in the back of her mind. It’d been the stuff of nightmares when she was a kid, and it was something that she had never let herself talk about to anyone; not to Patrick, Claire, her siblings— no one. She’d tried with Luther once, but he’d shot her down as soon as the word “alive” trickled from her mouth. After the release of Vanya’s book it had come up a couple times in conversations or interviews, but she’d always found a way to get out of talking about it in the end.

But even so, the  ** House ** had still somehow found her. It beckoned her to come back and warped things around her— would say “ I can bend things too. ” And make objects come up missing. Like a rumor, it’d twist her reality even despite how far away she was from its physical body.

So when her father died and the time came to visit the  ** House ** for his funeral, she wasn’t looking forward to it at all.

Her siblings hadn’t changed, and she admittedly hadn’t much either beyond the condemning of her powers. Klaus looked just as haunted as he’d always been, Diego was just as bitter, Vanya was just as quiet as she’d always been growing up, and Luther still somehow found a way to say something nice about Dad.

Ben was dead, but Five was back (and the future is shit, but that’s not the point). 

It all starts up again after Diego and Luther accidentally break Ben’s statue. Nothing really changes at first. In fact, things are perfectly  normal , which is what gives her the clue that something is actually off. 

Once all of them have gone back inside, with the exception of her and Klaus, she notices a small trickle of blood leaking from the place where the statue’s head was severed. She rubs her eyes, and the trickle grows into a small puddle thatspreads and spreads as she stares at it. Klaus has his eyes screwed shut, which means she can’t be crazy because he must’ve seen it too. 

She blinks again to see that blood now covers her hands, and all at once it reminds her of the day Ben had died; ripped apart by his own monsters.

She goes inside to wash her hands, but she still feels the stickiness between her fingers. 

________

When Claire turns 5, Allison buys her a pretty little doll**house**. It’s pink with white borders and blue roofs, and she’d spent all last month creating it from scratch. Claire loves it, and plays with it every day. When Allison puts her to sleep at night, Claire tells her about the imaginary figures she’d filled the house with. She never tells her their names, and insists it’s a secret if she asks. 

One day, Claire throws a tantrum. The window is open to let in the moonlight, and the chill of cold air is a nice welcome in contrast to the standard Californian humidity.They’d just finished reading a story and suddenly Claire is overcome with this awful wave of emotions. She starts whining when Allison tries to tuck her in, and bursts into sobs when she insists that it’s her bedtime. Eventually Allison becomes frustrated, and puts her bed with a quick rumor. She’s done it before, but it doesn’t stop the guilt from swelling in her chest when Claire goes slack and her eyes close. 

She closes her eyes and breathes a sigh of relief.

When she opens them, the room is dark. She turns to see the the light switch is flicked down, and when she goes to flick it back up the light doesn’t come back on. She tries three more times to no avail, and breathes out a a huff of frustration. Eventually, she turns back to Claire and sighs, and is just about ready to finish tucking her in when she hears the telltale flicking of the light switch. Allison turns back, and sure enough it’s moving on it’s own.

Up, down.

Up, down.

Up, down.

Another light flickers in her peripheral, and she turns to see a light in the window of the little doll**house** flipping on and off. 

On, off.

Up, down.

The light switch turns downward and the window goes dark, then back on again with another audible click.

Allison kneels down and watches the light, and she can see  something , a figure— standing in the window. She doesn’t recognize it as one of Claire’s dolls, but she can see that it’s clad in all black clothing. The flickering is too fast for her to make out its face, but before she knows it the flickering stops entirely. The light stays on, but the figure is gone, almost as if imagined. 

She blinks in confusion and sits back on the heels of her feet, and then all at once, the room explodes with sound. The door and the window slams shut and the curtains slide closed, followed by the rapid flickering of the light switch. This time the room light comes on, flitting on and off rapidly until the bulb explodes. Glass flies everywhere, and the room is thrown into a pitch blackness.

Allison gasps, her breath growing ragged and panicked as she goes to leave the room, but the door doesn’t budge. She leans her forehead against it, fear washing over her like cold water. Then, a chill runs down her spine, and she can faintly hear short wheezes from something behind her. In her peripheral, she can barely make out black boots and pants, soaked with blood and dripping on the floor. 

She doesn’t want to look.

Slowly, she squeezes her eyes shut, then goes to turn around. She braces her back against the door, but when she opens her eyes the figure is gone, replaced by an innocent little room bathed in darkness. No broken glass, a soft breeze blowing through an open window.

Then Claire shoots up out of the bed and screams, high pitched and sudden, and Allison finally does as well. She rushes over to her daughter’s bed, but Claire is back out before she can even reach her. 

“Claire?” She asks, smoothes her hair back and tucks it behind her ears. Her daughter doesn’t stir. 

“Claire?” She asks. 

“Wake up.” A voice says, just above her shoulder. It sounds like scattered ashes, or wind blowing through leafless trees. She goes to turn around, but before she can even do that she’s shooting up out of bed. 

“Claire?” She calls, and turns to see Patrick lying beside her.

Then, a hesitant:

“Ben?” 

The light switch flicks up, but the light doesn’t come on.

_____

Growing up with powers like hers inside a **House** like that, Allison had come to the early conclusion that reality is temporary. It is ever-changing, like the distortion of a staircase or the switching of a room. 

She’d frequently gotten lost in the  ** House ** , and understandably so. The  ** House ** was imposing and confusing, larger on the inside than it was on the out, and haunted with whispers that promised safe return. Of course, being a child, she’d trusted those voices at first; but seeing how they tormented Klaus, she stopped before they could leak themselves into her brain like they did his. 

Once, when she was painting his nails in the secrecy of her room, Klaus had asked her if she’d noticed anything about the  ** House ** . This was right after he’d had an outburst during supper about pests invading the walls of his room, to which Reginald had quickly taken care of with a swat to the face and an hour of “special training”. (They all knew what “special training” meant, all saw the look in Klaus’s eyes when he’d return after hours and sometimes nights of “training”. And some of them, the ones who were especially disliked— saw the look in their own eyes as well.)

It took her a while to answer, but eventually she stopped painting his nails to look up at him. “It changes sometimes.” She stopped. “I see weird things too, if it makes you feel better.”

And he looks the most relieved she’s ever seen him. 

_______

On October 2nd, a day after their 8th birthday and three weeks after their conversation, Klaus falls down the stairs and breaks his jaw. They all hear the screaming from their rooms, and find him writhing on the floor. His jaw is twisted at an odd angle, and seems almost unhinged in a way that forces her to look away. 

Later, when he’s not doped up on painkillers, he tells her through a sloppily written sticky note that the  ** House ** had changed right under his feet.

“I heard a rumor...” she starts, anything to keep him from saying anything else, because something in her fears that the  ** House  ** will try to silence her as well. 

And he gets this look of betrayal on his face as his hands still, unable to write any longer or communicate in any way. 

He stops coming to her about the  ** House  ** after that.

________

“It’s alive.” Allison says, and Luther doesn’t believe her.

Klaus’s screams echo from down the hallway. 

_______

Her own **Ho** ** use ** changes sometimes, like a monster corrupted by its own bad history. Claire comes to her crying, once, and tells her that the **H** ** ouse ** is talking. And with intense determination, anything to rid the voices of a body from another head, she whispers out a another rumor.

Except one rumor becomes two, and two become ten more. 

Patrick is horrified and their marriage falls apart like a collapsed building.

Claire disappears from her arms and haunts her like rats in the walls.

In a way, she’s the haunted **House **that shifts and moves.

_______

She loves her sister. 

She always has, but it’s always been more a distant thing in the back of her mind, already accepted as fact without approaching it. She’d regrettably made Vanya a second priority throughout their childhood, not because she didn’t have powers but because they simply just didn’t have anything to talk about. Allison, more focused on getting somewhere bigger in life, easily glossed over the constant twine of violin that sprung from Vanya’s room over long hours. 

In a way, the  ** House  ** had separated all of them. Perhaps it was on purpose, after all—safety is in numbers and if numbers 1-7 hated one another there was no safety to be kept. Maybe it’d whisper different things to different siblings, maybe it’d spread  rumors  but only just enough to reach a state of distrust. Perhaps it had especially targeted Vanya, filling her head with self-doubt and fictional words. 

Either way, Vanya hated her. Maybe not all the way, but it was still there; buried somewhere under that anxiety and frantic flutter of hands that danced around her throat as if too scared to touch her. 

And as blood spills and chokes her as she lay dying, she’s reminded of Ben’s statue. 

_______

(“Off with his head,” Klaus had written, over and over and over on walls and sticky notes and notebook pages. 

“Off with his head off with his-“ she hears it in her dreams, repeated like a mantra as Ben gurgles and drowns in a sea of blood—yanked down by inhuman appendages and reaching out to her. 

He dies only a few days later on a mission gone wrong, severed in two like a cruel recreation of a Black Dahlia.)

_______

Allison sits up, dead. Only she’s in the  ** House ** , which shifts and distorts freely around her. The walls extend beyond the normal height of the ceiling, and looking up makes her dizzy as she tries to peer into the blurred distortion the **House** had made of itself. Aligning the walls are little doll**houses**, lights flickering on and off in a steady rhythm. 

She hears giggling, and turns her head just to see Claire running past the doorway.

She walks towards the noise, then peers out of the doorway to look for her. The hallway is empty, except for the doll**houses** decorating the walls like paintings. She hears laughter above her, then turns to see Claire peering at her from on top of the stairway. 

“Claire?” She calls, making her way up the stairs. 

“Chase me Mommy!” She says, then runs off through a doorway.

Allison follows her, but when she makes it through, there is no floor for her left to run on. Looking down, she sees herself from only a few minutes ago. 

“Claire?” She calls again. Allison hears another giggle, but the girl doesn’t appear.

“I heard a rumor,”  The **House** muses, and it’s voice sounds like something miasmic.  “Isn’t that funny? You’re just as haunted as I am.”  And it laughs. She looks down to see the skin on her arm shriveling you and rotting, before peeling away and falling off. 

“Claire?” She calls. No giggle this time, but there’s a familiar wheezing coming from beside her. She turns, and sees Ben, holding up his head in his hands so that it’s facing her.

“Wake up.” Ben says, and he sounds so tired. 

“Ben? I-“

“It’s time to go.” He says, and splays his hand across her chest. She feels a sudden choking feeling there and black spots dance across her vision.

She opens her eyes to the sound of steady beeping. She gets up, and her legs almost immediately buckle.

“Hello?” Allison calls, and she hears arguing from downstairs. 

Vanya screams and screams, but goes unheard. Her siblings leave her to her fate. 

The world is consumed by fire, and time goes back to the day of a death. 


	4. Klaus: Lucidity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The House likes to talk. It likes to whisper secrets behind his headphones and truths that only he’ll ever know. It likes to sneak into his dreams and weave things of nightmares and fever times.

Klaus is in rehab. Klaus is in rehab because of years of filling his body with the type of poison that eats away at one’s brain and the type of acid that fizzles through skin and leaves nothing there.

Oftentimes, when he’s sober but just before the screaming starts—he’ll wish that things were different. He’ll wish that lucidity didn’t come with a price and that he didn’t have to constantly wade through dream water to avoid falling off ledges. But then the screaming starts and a little girl is cradling her guts in her arms and Klaus will remember a mangled body and empty eyes.

Klaus is in rehab but then his 30 days are up and he’s waltzing out with the type of grin that says he’ll never step back foot in that place, that Diego will never have to find him spaced out and foaming at the mouth ever again. Ben, who trails behind him, knows like everyone else that this is false. There is no hoping anymore, not with the memories that stalk Klaus like something dead and rotting.

His father is discovered dead the same day he wakes up in an ambulance, OD still fresh on his tongue and his body still reeling from its own death. Klaus knows he’ll have to go back to the Academy, with all its ghosts and moving doors. There was never anything right about that **House**.

And it starts almost as soon as he walks in, the cold feeling of darkness creeping on the edges. He thinks it’s worse than the ghosts, worse than any grief or OD that’s ever been pumped from his stomach because this **House** is so agonizingly alive. The cold of it burns in a way, makes his fingers go black if he touches the walls for too long and baptizes him in a numbness that even the drugs don’t give him.

His siblings are the same as they’ve always been. He isn’t surprised really, but then little Five comes back and the future is shit apparently and then Ben’s statue is destroyed and Ben himself looks so far away. One minute he’s staring at it mournfully (though he’d never liked the thing anyway) and the next he’s got these vacant eyes that see something that Klaus can’t possibly wish to ever look at again.

And Ben, with his hood thrown over his head and his voice so frighteningly fragile, says. “I wish you could see it.” And his voice dips into a whisper that is barely recognizable under the heavy pattering of the rain.

“I’m so cold.” He breathes in awe, lips bloodied—then disappears like confetti blown away.

Klaus puts his cigarette out in Reginald’s ashes and him and Ben will eat frozen waffles under the darkness of a city with no happiness.

And Klaus will wonder where all the streetlights went.

______

Klaus doesn’t know if he’s the first to realize it, but the **House** is crawling with something. He complains about it loudly, moans and groans about rats in the walls of his room until his siblings have grown tired of him and dad swats him across the face for attention seeking. He stops complaining after that, but the hurt of being dismissed still cuts through his skin like the searing sensation of a forming bruise.

The scratching persists.

He tries headphones, but that doesn’t work because the scratching starts on the inside of his ears. He tries alcohol, but the scratching starts in his brain as well.

He has dreams of sick rodents, manged and foaming at the mouth. Sometimes they are writhing or dead, or simply trying to get out. Those dreams always leave him terrified; terrified in a way that stops his heart and he’ll feel a cold that reminds him of the blackened fingers of death. He’s not sure if he dies on these nights, but he knows that there is nothing living during them. He thinks the **House** steals his breath to try out for its own, then spits it back into him once it’s had its taste and deemed it unsatisfactory.

“_Such_ _a_ _disappointment Number Four_”. It will say, and Klaus will not have the courage to remind it that Number Four has a name.

On the nights that Ben sleeps in his room or him the other way around, Ben will wake him up to tell him he talks in his sleep. Sometimes it’s about ghosts, other times it’s the rats.

He’s caught himself doing it, recorded himself whispering a mantra of “_rats in the walls rats in the walls rats in the walls_,” like something possessed.

Klaus has tried to tell the others, but they either refuse to talk about it or simply refuse to entertain the idea. He thinks Diego might believe him a little, but he always becomes so closed off when the subject comes up. Allison says she believes him, but rumors him to stop talking about it with her. Ben is really the only one he can talk about it with, and they spend countless hours at night clutching to each other in fear of what lies in wake behind doors that shouldn’t exist and stairways that weren’t there before. Maybe it’s childish, the way they cower; but it’s better than the shifting hallways and the scratching and the mangled boy that Ben claims to see every night.

(“There’s a mangled boy in the corner of my room.” Ben told him once, during the still hours of the night.

Klaus laughed, “I thought I was the one who saw ghosts?”

And Ben, who usually would, didn’t laugh or smile back. He simply laid back against the bed and clutched his stomach.)

One day a door appears in his room, right beside his bed where he would normally hear the scratching (rats in the walls rats in the-). It creaks open while he’s in bed and a black mold creeps from its edges. Something from the inside wants him so badly and he can feel it tugging him almost, pulling his focus as he pushes the door to open the rest of the way. And he follows whatever darkness beckons him in as if in some sorta trance, like something is fixing his body to dance along to its rhythm.

The door closes behind him and-

_____

Klaus thinks that he may die of a broken heart. His hands are covered in the blood of his once-breathing lover, who is now dead and buried and forgotten in a timeline that has healed from his absence. But Klaus feels the itchiness of time in his bones and is reminded of rats trapped in bedroom walls.

Klaus thinks he may die of a broken heart, but instead he dies surrounded by strobe lights and dancing bodies. Klaus dies from a cracked skull and is left there in his own blood by a brother that never cared to begin with.

God doesn’t like him, but he can’t blame her. Dad is disappointed in him, and he can’t blame him for that either. Dave is nowhere to be found.

“Did you know about the **House**?” He asks, and Reginald pauses, looks away.

He doesn’t answer, but Klaus gets the message. Dad tells him that he killed himself to reignite the flame that was the Umbrella Academy (but Klaus knows that it was the **House’s** idea).

Vaguely, Klaus feels as if this episode would have gone a different way had he lived in a different **house**. Same, but different. (This time he wakes up from death with blackened arms and hands, like sepsis creeping in after an untreated infection.)

He hears Ben on the edge of his mind, fretting and apologizing but the **House** is louder. The Academy, for all its faults, is warm like an embrace and Klaus leans into it like something starved.

______

The **House** likes to talk. It likes to whisper secrets behind his headphones and truths that only he’ll ever know. It likes to sneak into his dreams and weave things of nightmares and fever times.

“_Feast on Famine_.” It says. Klaus starves, and he writes.

Blink. The eyes on his walls watch.

_____

Ben dies on a mission gone wrong. Ben dies on a mission and all Klaus sees is a ripped body and a teary eyed thing in the corner of his room.

“Klaus.” It gurgles. Blood spills down its chin.

And he screams.

He screams and screams and he thinks he hears someone else saying something but he can’t hear because Ben is dead Ben is deadBenisdead.

Ben was alive but now he’s just a mangled boy with teary eyes and bloody lips.

(“There’s a mangled boy in the corner of my room.” Ben whispers, crawling into bed with him.

“What does he look like?” Klaus asks, shifting to face him.

And Ben’s eyes grow watery, threatening to spill over into drops. “He looks like me.”)

Ben dies and there is a funeral, but Klaus cannot possibly pay attention when Ben himself is staring so miserably at the statue that’s been hoisted up in fake remembrance.

“It looks nothing like me.”

Broken, Klaus laughs. He had a dream like this once.

_____

The apocalypse is averted through the power of good decisions.

He knows that this is not how this episode goes.

It’s written on his wall.

(“_The day we die_.”)

_____

The door closes behind him and Klaus is trapped in the darkness of a long corridor that twists and spins and flips into complicated paths. He walks and walks until he blinks and he’s on a ledge of some sort. It overlooks the living room, which is far down enough that it triggers a wave of anxiety in his gut at the thought of falling to his death. If he looks up, he’ll see the living room again, mirrored and upside down.

Bookshelves and doors stack on top of each other and staircases wind and twist into impossible shapes. If he closes his eyes then opens them, the house will rearrange itself in a way that leaves blurriness on the edge of his vision.

“_Number Four_.” Blink. The **House** shifts. “_Please stay_,_Number Four_.” Blink. Shift.

He sees Luther leave his room, whichopens up from under an overturned staircase, and sneak to Allison’s room. Rats scamper past Klaus’s feet and disappear through a door that when he opens, leads to nothing but a brick wall.

“_Number Four_.”

Blink. The walls close in and the ledge grows closer.

(“_Feast on Famine_.”)

The **House** hungers, and Klaus is starved.

Its walls salivate and his skin is starting to peel away.

Blink. There’s a telephone next to him, bright red and out of place. It rings, and Klaus picks up.

“Hello?” He asks.

A gurgled voice sounds through, and a mangled hand grabs his wrist.

“Wake up.” Ben says.

____

Klaus wakes up.

His limbs are black with decay, and he feels the way his heart stutters before starting again. The door is gone like a memory lost.

“_THIS IS THE DOOR_.” He writes in its place.

____

On days where Reginald shuts him in the mausoleum overnight and he doesn’t get a wink of sleep; Klaus asks himself what it’s like to be alive in a still body. He asks himself what it is to be a being like The **House**, large and unable to wander, but breathing all the same.

What does it think? What does it dream?

______  
  
Armageddon comes, burning and sweet— and they escape in a burst of blue light and younger bodies. Times goes back and Klaus is in the backseat of a car.

“Do you hear that?” Klaus asks, staring out of the window. 

“Hear what?” Diego asks, clenching Dad’s monocle in his hand. 

“The **House**. It’s so alive.” And he pauses. “It’s calling my name. Number four please come back.” 

And Diego is quiet for a moment, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. Maybe he hears it too. “That **House** has never been right.” He says, like he always has.

Klaus feels something wet under his hands, and looks at them to see blood staining his palms. It sticks to the leather of the backseats.

And Ben, who sits in the middle of it with his bloodied lips and mangled body, looks at him with something haunted in his eyes. He looks like the day he died.

“Don’t go to sleep.” He gurgles out.

Back at the Academy, a door opens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Klaus and Ben’s chapters are gonna be longer because they go into more detail about what exactly the House is.


	5. Five: End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And it figures, that even when everything else is destroyed and nothing else remains alive, the House continues to live.

Five is 58 years old when he lands in 2019, trapped in a body too small and clothes too big. Today marks the death of Reginald Hargreaves, and his siblings all stare at him with a shared look of utter bewilderment.

“Shit.” He says. He can work with this.

But hold on, wind back a bit.

13 years old and in the same too small body for an ego as big as his, Five lands in a destroyed future, standing amongst the rubble of what the world once was. He breathes in and chokes, smoke cluttering inside his lungs and burning up his chest like a cigarette. He tries jumping back once, twice, then three times.

He is trapped, and for a second everything is quiet.

Then all at once, a screaming starts in his head, shrill and pained. It sounds familiar, although he’s never heard its voice pitched so high.

The **House**, crumbled and destroyed, shrieks and shrieks in pain.

And it figures, that even when everything else is destroyed and nothing else remains alive, the **House** continues to live. It lives, and it suffers— its body ripped apart and dismembered. The **House** screams in agony, as if paying for its own sins. Under it lay the dead bodies of his siblings, not crushed but simply laying there dead. Not all of them, though. He doesn’t find Vanya or Ben.

But something in him knows that they are gone all the same.

________

On the second day, Five buries his siblings.

Their bodies are heavy and his hands blister from shoveling dirt. The sun beats on his back uncomfortably, making him sweat through his clothes, so every time he moves he feels a gross wetness gathering under his underarms that makes him wince and tense up. His arms tire out after he finally manages to drag Luther to the hole he dug out for him, and it’s at this point that he finally cries. The **House** is a constant ringing in his ears, too busy in its own pain to taunt him this time. So he cries and cries till his eyes dry up and everything shrivels up and feels numb. The sun does not care, nor does the **House** or the sky or anything at all.

Eventually though, he leaves their graves to find food, water— anything. He knows he won’t survive long without anything to his name.

He returns a day later to find Klaus’s grave disturbed and empty. Dirt is strewn across the burial site, and some of it trails away like something with dirty hands and knees crawled away. The body is gone, as if it somehow dug itself out and walked away. There’s traces of blood leading away from the site, but it disappears a little over four feet away.

He never finds Klaus, or whatever took his body.

Loneliness swallows him whole.

_______

The **House** finally dies on a cold night that leaves him shivering and drowsy. All he knows is that its screams fizzle out like a snuffed flame and his head is finally empty enough for him to form his own thoughts.

But strangely enough, he misses it.

_______

Five finds a friend in a girl named Delores, who’d been abandoned to the elements and left to rot in a world doomed.

“Help me, Number Five.” Delores says, in a voice that’s familiar. He doesn’t question how she already knows his name, his brain too fried from isolation and quiet to really care.

“Ok.” He says, his voice ringing out over the quietness of a great nothing.

_______

His siblings don’t take him seriously and he hates it, hates that they’re so absorbed in their own problems to process impending doom. It grates on his nerves like rats chewing on wires, like stomach acid burning away flesh and digesting it whole. Even Vanya doesn’t take him seriously, tries to convince him that he imagined it all.

Whatever, he can work with this.

Klaus punches him in the face and smashes a snow globe into his own, all for a lead that doesn’t work out and an eye that might as well belong to no one.

“The day we die.” Klaus says, when they’re outside sitting on the steps after a day of failures and black eyes. The phrase sounds familiar, and it brings to mind a passage in Vanya’s book about how Klaus had grown cruel and disconnected ever since Ben’s death.

“The day we die?” Five asks, interested.

“April 1st.” Klaus says— smiles even, but it pulls at his face and makes him look vicious and unkind. But Klaus had never been unkind, not when he knew him. Something had since leaked into his brain and made him that way, whether it was the **House**, Reginald, or both; he couldn’t say. He hadn’t grown up with the **House** like his siblings did, didn’t grow into adulthood with a disembodied voice that made him rethink all his choices and second guess himself.

(But didn’t he?)

And no matter how much he’d missed it during the apocalypse, he knew it was for the best.

He’d never seen the stomach.

______

“I want to time travel.” He tells Vanya, only a few minutes after a particularly grueling training session. He’s sitting on her bed, watching her pack away her violin. He wonders what it’s like, to be alone and different— your only company being an object that you’d given life.

And she looks at him, with this painful glint in her eyes. “I’d miss you.” Vanya says, reaching out to grab his hand. He knows she wouldn’t really have anyone else, so he takes her hands and smiles at her with something that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“I’d take you with me.” He says.

“_Liar_ _liar_.” The **House** laughs.

He leaves her only a few days later.

The world is on fire.

_______

He finds an arm, bloody and rotted in the wreckage of what once was a pharmacy.

“_Hello_.” The hand reads.

Dread curls in his gut, but he can’t place why.

“_Naive_ _Number_ _Five_.” Delores whispers from her place in his little red wagon.

_______

He finds a half destroyed **house**, dusty and lonely away from the rest of what use to be a city. There are books strewn about the property, some of which he takes for later reading. There’s also a shattered tv, as well as two rotting corpses lounging on a burned up couch that when he kicks, roaches skitter away and into cracks in the floor. He makes a mental note to catch some for rations.

He’s rummaging through the wreckage of the **house** when he feels a handle, weighed down by caved in debris from the ceiling and other unrecognizable items. Quickly, almost frantically, he picks up and throws away the offending items— but once the basement door is free he hesitates.

“_Open_ _it_.” Delores says, voice sounding oddly lustful, like something hungering for prey.

Against his better judgement he does open it, even walks down the stairs a little. But a sound catches his attention. He tries turning on the light, to no avail, so he lights a match and holds it up to the source of the noise. The first thing that he sees is water, murky and cloudy with dirt, and completely flooding the bottom half of the basement. All is still for a moment, until a splashing noise sounds from somewhere to his right. Hope seizes his heart and he walks down the stairs— not enough to be in the water but just enough that he’s standing right over it.

“Hello?” Five calls, only to be met with silence. Hope turns to fear as the silence stretches over the old bunker, and it’s only then that he starts to smell a disgusting rotting smell.

Then; a hand shoots out of the water, as well as a face— but the figure is moving too much to get a good look at it. It swims frantically to where he’s standing, then gives up when it’s right in front of him and begins to sink. On reflex, Five reaches out to grab its hand, still outstretched above the water. With as much strength as he can manage for someone only surviving on bugs and already-dead animals, he hauls the figure out of the water till he can see its face.

He chokes when he sees Diego, a younger and uncrushed Diego staring back at him. His eyes look so desperate, and like something starved he seizes Five’s hand and uses his momentary surprise to drag him into the water. Five sputters out water and tries anything to make it back to the surface. He manages to kick at Not-Diego enough for him to release his hand, but then other hands are grabbing him and he recognizes Allison and Luther yanking on his legs and pulling him deeper into the water.

He blacks out and-

“_Wake_ _up_.” _A voice sounds from behind him, like something disconnected and out of a dream. It’s almost ghostly, spirit-like in how it floats and wavers on a nonexistent wind. __He looks around for it, but all he sees is a constant void of water. He blinks, and then he’s standing on the shore of a beach— feet bare and half buried in pink (pink?) sand. _

_A rattling noise echoes behind him and he whips around, only for whatever made the noise to shift and disappear. A shiver goes down his spine and his skin spikes with goosebumps. _

_Then_— _right_ _by_ _his_ _ear_

“_Wake_ _up_.”

His eyes shoot open.

The basement is gone, as well as the water and his not-siblings.

He’s still in the **house** with the rotting corpses and the shattered TV, but there is no door to suggest that there ever was a basement to begin with.

The only evidence to suggest that he wasn’t dreaming are the bruises on his wrist and ankles.

________

There’s enough blood on his hands to cover a large canvas, maybe even more than that.

The **House** can’t get him outside of time.

_________

The apocalypse happens anyway, no matter how much he tries to prevent it. 

“_I_ _missed_ _you_ _Number_ _Five_.” The **House** whispers, as if it hadn’t been with him all along.

They escape and it is Day 1.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short chapter but iss whatever, tell me if I forgot to bold any mention of the word “house”


	6. Ben: Anatomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has always been connected to death, inevitable as it is; lurking just beneath his skin like rats in the walls of a house that was never right.

<strike></strike>Ben is dead. But Ben has always been dead, even when he was alive; so this is nothing new. Klaus used to tell him that he could sense his soul through his skin, like a ghost wailing through padded walls. The wailing gets louder when he opens up the door in his stomach, his monsters ripping past his ribs and bathing his body in blood that is both his and isn’t. 

He has always been connected to death, inevitable as it is; lurking just beneath his skin like rats in the walls of a **House** that was never right. And like that **House** that was never right, neither was he.

But today Ben is dead, with the last remaining thing of him being the soul that wished so badly to escape the vessel it came in. Today, Reginald is also dead, but Ben cannot find it in himself to care. 

He and Klaus step foot in a cold **house** that has always been cruel and unkind. And the **House** , in all its aliveness whispers, “ _ Do you remember me, Number Six? _”

And blood spills over his lips. 

______

The **House** has a body. It has a spine in its long winding staircases that sometimes go on forever, twisting and turning until you blink and you were never walking up any stairs to begin with. It has eyes in its walls that appear when your back is turned long enough, spying on your every move. Its windows are eyes too, as well as the cameras planted throughout the **House** that catch every flinch, watching and anticipating with bated breath.

It has 43 mouths that take the form of 43 rooms; 43 mouths where one might sleep and hope to god the **House** doesn’t swallow them whole. But like a crocodile, the **House** holds its mouths open and bides its time. 

Its heart lay in the living room, pumping blood through pipes that double as veins; veins that if you cut spurt and flood and leak out. 

Its stomach is under everything, hidden behind illusions of normalcy and anatomy. It is harder to find, but if you listen to its soft voice it’ll lead you through enough hallways till you find it; like food passing through intestines. 

Ben learns all of this through years of traversing the **House’s** dark corridors at odd hours of the night, his feet moving his body as though if in a trance (Like a ghost, dead and without purpose). He learns all of this through days where he’ll run water for a bath and the tub will be painted red as the **House** bleeds out. And when he dreams, he’ll catch a glimpse of the **House** for what it really is— a living being, full of blood and organs and bones and functioning with a mind of its own. It breathes, and he can feel its lungs in his own chest; like something monstrous trying to get out. 

The **House** , like his eldritch, feeds. Except the **House** lures you in and plays on memories you’ve never wanted and desires you’ve never thought were there, it lures you in with promises then strips your skeleton clean of its flesh. 

And Ben, like so many others before him; like so many of the ghosts that haunt the Academy, is stripped bare of all he is till his monsters tear him apart. The **House** whispers, “ _ Sleep, Number six _.” 

And he lets it snap its mouth shut and chew him up with gnashing teeth. 

______

Ben wakes up and he cannot move. Ben wakes up and there is a mangled boy floating a foot above him, his stomach torn apart and his ribs wide open as if pulled apart from behind. His face is twisted into an agonized expression, blood leaking from his stomach and mouth and staining his sheets. Inhuman appendages hang limply from his mess of a body, like hands reaching down to grab him. 

The boy is close enough that Ben can see his face, and just enough that he can hear him saying something—but it comes out gurgled and choked up with muddled blood. 

“_ Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh go _-“

Ben screams. 

______

His siblings destroy his statue. He’s never really liked it to begin with, but it does hurt a little— to be forgotten so easily that a fit of rage can destroy the very thing that kept his being rooted in the real world. 

(“And there goes Ben’s statue.” Allison says. But none of them seem to really care for its damaged existence.)

But it’s so beautiful in a way; to be forgotten, because he can see blood spreading from the sever in between the statue’s body and head. And it spreads and spreads, until he blinks and it’s knee deep. 

(“_ Off with his head off with his head off with his _-“)

Blink. Blood is soaking his hoodie, and he can feel the familiarity of fluid bubbling up from his throat and spilling over his lips. 

Blink. Klaus is squeezing his eyes shut behind him, and Ben smiles. “I wish you could see it.” He says, voice floating on the rain. 

And there’s a feeling there, numbness in his fingers and toes. It feels like blue lips and goosebumps on bare skin. 

Oh.

“I’m so cold.” He whispers, realizes; feels himself drift away like a balloon let go. 

A boy wakes up and cannot move. Ben reaches out to a familiar face. 

______

“There’s something wrong with this **House**, Ben.” Klaus whispers. He’s loud with the scent of cannabis and smoke, eyes tinted red and crazed with too many sleepless nights. “Ben? Ben wake up. There’s something wrong.”

“Klaus? It’s late.” Ben complains, sitting up and yawning. He’s used to being woken up by now, even comes to expect it. Neither of them seem to ever be able to sleep in their own rooms, at least without the other right there with them. 

“I can hear it. Can’t you? The scratching?” Klaus starts, his voice raising. There’s a spark of panic in his eyes, like there’s something after him and he can hear its footsteps circling him like prey. He grabs his wrist. “It wants your head, it told me. You’re dead, you’re dead— it’ll eat you alive.” 

“Klaus calm down, you’re being too loud.” Ben shushes, calmly removing Klaus’s hand and holding it with his own. “My room isn’t soundproof like yours, remember? You’ll wake someone.” 

“You’re right, silly me. Sweet Ben, Bennifer. You’re always right.” Klaus smiles, then stills. His eyes slide over to the door that leads to his library room. 

“Benny, Ben, I don’t remember you having another door.” Klaus says, his voice falling back to a whisper.

Come to think of it, he doesn’t either. 

There’s a scratching coming from the other side of the door, like rats wanting to be let out. 

Then Klaus is clinging to him, whispering something under his breath that mingles with the sound of the scratching. 

“Off with his head off with his head off with his-“ 

“This is just a dream.” Ben tries, disjointed. 

The chanting stops, and Klaus pulls Ben to look at him. “It’ll say you’re dreaming, but it’s just killing you in your sleep.” He gasps. “You have to wake up you have to wake up you have to-” 

(“_ Would it be so bad to die?” The _ ** _House_ ** _ asks _.)

Ben wakes up.

He’s in his room again, only this time Klaus is asleep next to him, his arms wrapped loosely around his chest. A loud creak sounds throughout his room, and the door from his dream slides open—falsely welcoming. 

Sitting up, Ben stares at it; it’d never been scary to him before. He stands up, Klaus’s arms falling away from him as he inches towards the door; his mind feels foggy. Then there’s a hand wrapped around his wrist, yanking him away from the door and out of the haze. He looks back to see Klaus staring at him with wide eyes. 

“I told you to wake up.” He whispers.

Gangrene crawls up his arms. 

_______

Ben dies. 

Reginald sends him on a mission with Luther. Reginald sends him on a mission with Luther but he knows that his father is just setting him up to die; knows that this will be the last time he ever feels anything but the cold passing of time. His monsters know too, maybe even better than him. The **House** tells him before he leaves, and he feels it already beginning to feast on the memory that was him. 

(“_ Sleep, Number Six _.”)

He lets his eldritch tear through his body and rip it apart like paper, and his own screams are the last thing he hears before he succumbs to blinding pain. 

Ben dies and his body is severed in two.

(“_ Off with his head. _”)

_______

(_ A door appears in his room when he’s 13. He doesn’t remember it ever being there, but somehow does through an odd sense of displacement. When he enters it he’s greeted by an endless labyrinth of bookshelves; his own personal library. _

_ His monsters groan in protest every time he opens a book, as if they know something is wrong. As if they smell something putrid. _

_ Every word he reads fills his head with an increasing sense of dread, and blood drips out through his eyes. _)

_______

Ben is dead. 

Blink.

He wakes up anyway.

Agony burns him alive and he cannot move, he wakes up suspended in the air above a familiar face. The back of his throat feels slick with blood, and he watches it drip drip drip on white sheets. There’s a scratchy _ number six (protector, a dream-walker that brings wakefulness but also festers with unwanted malevolence.) _carved into the wooden floor on the side of the bed. 

A child stares up at him.

“Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god-“

The child screams and- Blink. 

The same child stares at him, cowering behind the same blankets that he remembers staining and darkening with strewn innards. He watches the same blood drip and spread till it takes the shape of a shaky _ number 3 (creation and completion, like a bad rumor bringing something sinister into existence.)_

He feels rot on his body; smells it even.

Blink.

He’s in a labyrinth of sorts; feels the **House** in the back of his mind lurking and whispering like the monsters in his ribcage. The hallways shift and change around him, and up ahead he sees a child emerge through a door that disappears just as it comes into existence. 

The child— Klaus (_ four, something evil and reeking of death— **House**-like in its cruelty_), he realizes, skulks through darkened hallways until the **House** rearranges itself into some mockery of its anatomical body. 

This is the stomach, he realizes. 

Blink. He’s in a payphone. He picks up the phone and dials _634_.

“Hello?” A voice picks up.

The connection garbles and shorts and- Blink. 

Ben grabs Klaus’s wrist; feels the **House** hunger and lust for what it knows it can’t have. 

“Wake up.” He urges.

Blink. The other child is back. He feels his lungs beating outside of his body and the child is screaming and he _ remembers _all of it and-

(_ “He looks like me.” _)

_______

The apocalypse comes swift and fatal, but they manage to escape in a haze of blue light. Again, Ben sits in the backseat of Diego’s car, hood drawn over his head.

“That **House** has never been right.” Diego says.

He feels himself coming apart at the seams and falling into that familiarity of red stickiness. Blood soaks his hoodie, and drips down his chin. 

Klaus looks at him with a sleepiness gracing the edge of his features. 

“Don’t go to sleep.” Ben says. 

It reeks of stomach acid. 


	7. Vanya: Ordinary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being ordinary— it made her feel like an outsider. Even now she feels out of place; except her siblings seem to outright dislike her instead of simply looking past her.

Vanya does not cherish much from her childhood. She spent most of it in complete misery, popping meds and envying her siblings from a cramped room with no love built into it. Being ordinary— it made her feel like an outsider. Even now she feels out of place; except her siblings seem to outright dislike her instead of simply looking past her. But maybe that’s her own fault. Her book hadn’t done much besides further sever their relationship. It was meant to be her moment of confidence, something she was doing for herself. And yes; maybe she wanted to hurt her siblings, but only a little bit— if only to make them understand what they’d put her through when she was younger.

But even so, everything she’d written was stripped down to its barest truth. And she’d written about everything—from Diego’s phobia of needles all the way down to Ben’s death. She even wrote about the **House**, which seemed to haunt all 7 of them up until they either disappeared, died, or packed up and left. She didn’t know what the **House** did to the others besides minor details like moving doors and imaginary rats in the walls, but for her the **House** had often appeared to her as a carbon copy of her own image. Sometimes her reflection would move by itself and talk to her in a voice that was hers but also wasn’t, or it would follow behind her at night when she got up to use the bathroom. Her therapist (and many others) had chalked the occurrences up to a shared delusion. Others, such in case a book reviewer and an online journalist who wrote in-depth articles about the paranormal, had gone into detail analyzing the makings and anatomy of the Umbrella Academy **House**. For many, the story of a living **house** became more sensational than the one of a child who suffered the emotional and verbal abuse from her siblings and father.

It was infuriating, to say the least.

So when the time came for her to go back to that **House** after her father died, she was not pleased in the slightest. She did not want to see her siblings, nor hear or talk to them. Everything she expected to happen ended up happening, some of which included verbal lashings from her siblings (Diego to be more specific), as well as an all out fist fight. What she didn’t account for was for little Five to appear out of a blue pulse of nowhere, just in time for the beginnings of the actual funeral.

“The future is shit.” He’d said, or something like that. And honestly? She wasn’t surprised.

Something she also didn’t account for was for Ben’s statue to break right at the neck after a nasty hit from Luther. And okay— not great, but it never looked like him anyway.

But that didn’t matter much, because she looks over to see the little doppelgänger girl from her childhood— all timid and Vanya-like. She’s holding out her hand, as if asking for it to be held back. And she knows it’s just the **House** trying to deceive her, trying to win her back from all those years she’d been gone, But something in her compels her to take the offered hand anyway.

_________

_The **House** had terrorized my siblings until they grew cruel and disconnected from any semblance of the real world, and Dad’s continued abuse did not make matters any better._

_Luther, most unusually, had latched on to the **House** like something tethered and captive. He never left like the rest of us, always insisting complete disbelief in what we all knew was a living entity. And who was he to deny anything anyway? We all knew that the House had infiltrated his head just like it did to the rest of us, you could tell by a certain look in his eye or the way he’d randomly flinch as if something was whispering in his ear._

_Diego was different. He didn’t try and deny that the **House** was alive; he simply just never talked about it. The one time he did it was after a special training session that left him scratched up and bruised, which was odd because his special training didn’t involve any of the sort of things that might injure him in such a fashion. So when Dad had simply told us that the injuries were self-inflicted, we knew it was a lie; especially when Diego had come out and said so himself that “That **House** was never right.” And although that was really the only time he spoke of it, we all noticed how sometimes when he came down for breakfast his clothes were soaking wet. We all saw the lingering puddles of water (or perhaps acid?) in his room._

__________

Vanya meets Leonard Peabody through a violin lesson and a wood-shop. He tells her she’s special, and she falls in love on the spot.

**House** Vanya reaches to take her hand, but she doesn’t hold it this time. She doesn’t need her anymore.

And **House** Vanya, with a voice she’d stolen from her childhood, says _“The day we die.”_

It sounds like a warning.

_________

She supposed she’d been lucky in her childhood, to escape as unscathed as she did. She did envy her siblings for their powers and the attention they got from Dad, but she was well aware that she was fortunate in regards to the** House**.

She doesn’t know why but it’d always been nice to her, all while simultaneously tormenting her siblings and chewing them up like something edible. It had never infested her room with pests, or opened up random, previously-not-there doors if only to lead her to its _stomach_. The **House** had only ever provided her a friend when she had no one else; a little clone girl who held her hand when she cried and comforted her when her siblings went on missions. "**House** Vanya", as she always called the girl, was her only friend growing up after Five disappeared. It used to be Ben, but as the **House** seeped into his head he began to gravitate more towards Klaus.

And that was how it was until he died, torn apart by his own monsters.

But she knew it was the **House**.

_“I did this for you, Vanya.”_ It would whisper to her, curled up against her in bed and holding her hand as she sobbed. _“I would never abandon you like he did.”_

And that was when she started pushing the **House** away. It was when she finally started to see. The **House** wasn’t her friend. **House** Vanya was just an extension of some part of it that wanted to infest her brain, wanted to melt inside her head like ice held tightly in the palm of one’s hand. It wanted to keep her all to itself. It was her fault Ben died, she realized.

So when Diego and Allison leave, abandoning them to the cold grip of the **House**, she’s the next to go.

And she has _dreams_ like she’d never had before.

_________

_Vanya walks through the academy, eyes white and her body shuddering like something violent. All she can hear is her own heartbeat._

_But as she brings the **House** down and crushes her siblings, she hears something else break through her thoughts before she’s crushed as well by falling debris._

_The **House** screams, agonized and suffering._

_______

She wakes up, and still hears the **House** screaming in her head, tormented and anguished.

She wonders if she’s imagining it.

________

She _hates_ her siblings, all of them without a single doubt.

Leonard tells her she is special and they throw it back in her face like it’s just a grouping of letters. For the first time she is off her pills and she knows that she is more than what anyone told her she could be. Allison is so stuck in her old ways, so envious and hateful that she wants to take everything from her, just like she did when they were four and Vanya was trapped in a room with a made up little girl.

Allison says “I heard a rumor-“

And Vanya slashes the bow of her violin like something angry and vengeful. Blood splatters against her face before she can really realize what she did, and then its spurting uncontrollably from her sister’s neck. Instantly, guilt roots itself in her stomach—aches and prods at her like rotting intestines. All at once, her mind explodes with a frantic fluttering that feels like moth wings flitting behind her face. She tries anything to stop the inevitable from happening, and her hands become bloody and drenched as she presses them to Allison's throat. Everything is too loud, and she can feel the raggedness of choking sounds and screaming stretching over her skin, like gum sticking to chapped lips.

Leonard pulls her away and there is a trace of a smile on his face, as if he is proud of her wrongdoings. She feels sick, like she might vomit up everything she'd eaten that day—and before she's dragged out of the door of the cabin she sees Allison's eyes close as her breath finally stutters out. 

(She doesn’t see her siblings whisk her sister away, and she doesn’t see Allison wake up from dreams of an alive House and a dead brother.)

Power ripples around her, and Leonard dies like his own Ides of March.

_________

_Allison had never talked about the **House** at all really. Maybe she did about with Luther or Klaus, but she never seemed to acknowledge it in any way besides a slight glint in her eye of understanding. I do know that her and Klaus began to grow apart after he fell down the stairs and broke his jaw. He never snuck out to her room anymore, and only ever seemed to gravitate towards Ben those days. However, with Allison’s powers being related to reality, I always would have imagined that she saw the worst of the **House**. I never asked, but my imagination would run wild with possibilities of infinite hallways and inhuman figures._

_Klaus was different; different in that the House had so badly possessed his thoughts that he'd turned cruel and paranoid. He refused to walk the **House** at night, and only ever snuck out through his bedroom window. He’d write gibberish and seemingly meaningless phrases on his walls, and repeat sayings and quotes that no one but him had ever written or spoke aloud. This was something that he’d often claim otherwise about— insisting on the existence of entire events and eras that never even took place. It was weird, but none of us really thought much of it. We all knew (me to a lesser extent) that the House was simply influencing him, especially seeing as he’d let it in so easily at such an early age. Dad theorized that his powers had somehow connected him to the **House**, something that I’d only learned when eavesdropping on a conversation between him and Pogo. Otherwise, he never admitted to the illogic of the **House** aloud._

________

Allison forgives her but she still finds herself in a cage, deaf to everything but her own panicked screams bouncing off metal walls. Her siblings are arguing in front of her, and Luther looks especially defensive as her siblings point and rant. **House** Vanya stares at her from her reflection in the vault door, pitying and silent. But eventually her siblings leave and everything else is quiet as well.

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t scream.

_“Listen to your heartbeat.”_ **House** Vanya says, her voice— so off and agonizingly not hers—filling the room. _“It’s the only sound.”_

And she listens.

She listens and remembers apocalypse dreams and crushed bodies, remembers the screaming of a cruel **House** and a crushed little girl that was never there to begin with.

She listens, and pauses— brows furrowing when she looks up and sees her siblings making their way back. There’s Diego, Klaus, Allison— and behind them something blue and faint, a figure she recognizes but can’t pinpoint at the same time.

And as they finally let her out, her skin chilling as it meets open air— she wonders what it would take to kill the monster inside the walls.

_________

_For a long time I hated Five for leaving me. I hated him for abandoning me to a sad **House** and an uncaring family. I hated him for making a promise that he knew he wouldn’t keep. But at the same time I’d understood. Five had suffered just as much as everyone. He'd lived under the same roof and under the same hand that didn’t hesitate to hit and push. He, like everyone else, had still lived with the same voice that invaded the thoughts and infested one’s body. I don’t remember much from his time spent with us before he disappeared, but I do remember him telling me that the **House** had not existed on this same plane of existence, something he’d discovered when he made a particularly disastrous jump and landed in a House that was nowhere and elsewhere at the same time. He liked to call it The Brain._

_Ben had this awful obsession with the **House**, similar to Klaus but different in that he’d payed for that same obsession with his own death. It’d started sometime when we were 12, around the same time he started hanging out with Klaus but before Five ran away. However, when Five did disappear (and showed no signs of coming back), he began having these terrible visions that would leave him still and terrified. Shortly before we grew apart, he’d tell me about a mangled boy; an older version of himself who would visit him at night and cry his eyes out. I never believed him, and maybe that’s why we stopped really hanging out after that. No; he’d preferred Klaus, who was just as haunted as him if not more so with the inclusion of ghosts. I thought it was for the best; but instead of getting better Ben had steadily began to grow worse over the years, and it wasn’t uncommon to see him reading books about dream-walking and life after death. It was clear to everyone that he was consumed with the idea of dying, his words always somehow turning grim and morbid. It got to a point where I’d come to dread having conversations with him, so eventually I just— didn’t. Of course, I regretted this when he died. And I still do. You never really get over seeing a ripped up mangled mess of your brother._ _He was barely recognizable as something human, and the only thing you could make out as him from pictures was his severed ribcage— which had torn at the sternum and come to resemble something ugly and pulled back. _

_Is that insensitive? Probably. _

_I remember that Klaus had gone absolutely wild. He’d screamed and kicked and hit, his voice gurgled with saliva as he repeated a mantra of “Ben Ben Ben-“. It grew to be too much to handle and he was eventually sedated. It was traumatizing to say the least, and he was never the same after that. Neither were we, though. Ben's death had been the last straw and our little poorly held together family began to break apart and tear._

_________

In the end, the **House** comes down. She doesn’t remember much, but she knows it is her fault.   
  


Armageddon comes in a theatre and a white suit, and Vanya sleeps.


End file.
